Airship Ballet
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Posts posted by Airship Ballet
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
It's okay Biker: I think you're pretty.
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I do this. I want them to listen.
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Or the best one, Skyward Fire
What a weird way to spell Razorback. Is that the French spelling or something?
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The soundtrack to UT99 was intense, definitely one of my favourites. They chose their songs really, really well in accordance with their map aesthetics. It's just a shame that those responsible for making custom maps always paired them with this music for some reason. Could have been the default on servers missing the intended music, who knows, but so many custom maps used that. It bored me to tears.
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How do I set so that the lock AND the grate frob-highlight in unison?
Insert any chest prefab you like and look at the set-up between the lid and the body there. It's exactly the same for this. To outline it, though:
- Make your door/gate as usual, but don't put any lock-related args on it
- Make your lock and turn it into an atdm:froblock
- Give the locked, pickable, lock_picktype, lock_pins and used_by args to the froblock entity and make it target the door/gate
- Give the froblock a "frob_peer" arg that names your door/gate and give the door/gate a "frob_master" arg that names the lock
Now they should both highlight when you look at one, and you should be able to pick the door whether you look at it or the lock
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Just loaded Deus Ex - the original - God the graphics are awful - and Deus Ex Invisible War isn't much better
Your Biker is showing, although you're not wrong. Old games certainly haven't aged well, but you have to dial back your state of mind to go back to enjoying crappy-looking games. I think it's a mistake to go in with a modern perspective and then say they haven't aged well and look bad. I reckon you're only allowed to say that if you can literally never get past it, which isn't the case for Deus Ex: the sound design and general mood of it are pretty involving. I kinda like the feel of the original though. Somehow its shoddy graphics really fit its mood, but it could just be all that contemporaneous synth, like how Flash FM fits the crappy pastel visuals of Vice City.
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Is that the Illuminati or the Reptilians?
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I really long for functional drop-in-and-it-works-hassle-free -solution
Don't we all.
Has anyone mentioned the rotation problem in the DR bugs thread? I can't imagine it'd be very difficult to fix.
A workaround would be the best, but a funny side effect of it is that I've been forced to be more original than just placing prefab shelves with items already on them on several occasions. If nothing else, it enforces originality!
I wouldnt worry about doing so much work like that.
Frankly, I just do it to chill out. When I'm alone, have had my fill of everything else and am in the mood, I'll stick on some TV, music, a podcast, whatever, and just make stuff to wind down. I don't do it when it feels like work. Thanks for the kind words all the same!
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Uh-huh. I was going to do that, but really it'd mean 40 prefab entries on the list, which is nuts.
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Oh, hey, while we're at reporting bugs, the prefab viewer is crashing me every single time I try to load a second prefab. If I click one in the import prefab window, it works, but if at any point in the same session I try to click another, it crashes DR.
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Yep! As with the usual prefabs the extras rotate on a different axis, meaning you'll have to re-position the lockbox, lever and key if you rotate them.
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The only problem I had on non lethal was stopping one of the heavies getting killed when the robot blows up - took me several goes (I created a save at the start) and on the successful one I had to drag one heavy out of range
To ensure you did it on non lethal you have to check all the bodies afterwards
Did this exact thing. God it was a pain: those dudes lift.
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Who doesn't have kinky halloween photos of themselves ball-gagged in sad-clown submissive lingerie in their backroom bdsm disco dungeon getting whipped by their murderous-clown-wear dominatrix?
Right?
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It doesn't help that Adam through the entire game barely shows a shred of emotion and is comically inept in the cutscenes.
It's a shame that they fixed that exploit at the beginning of the fight with Namir. You used to be able to use a takedown and end it immediately if you sprinted up to him at the start before he disappeared. It was hilarious, Jensen getting his ass kicked in the cutscene, then just flooring Namir a second later and jumping to the cutscene with him really messed up. It's a good point though: Jensen is supposed to act as the empty vessel into which the player pours their character through conversation choices and the like, as in Dragon Age and whatnot. He acts in a consistent manner in cutscenes though, with an easily identifiable personality of his own, which is something that prevents him ever really reflecting the player's attitude towards the augmentation conundrum. He acts tough and apathetic, which really clashes with any earnest conversation options you choose that have him show genuine care in Elias Toufexis' ridiculous voice. They seem to have already made up their mind as to what kind of person Jensen is, but still allow you to choose kind options that have him say soppy stuff. It's hard to get around though: to achieve a genuine tabula rasa of a playable character, I imagine they'd have to be silent or unassuming to the nth degree.
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To me, its different. That game delivers a story to the involved player, where you think about the problems arising from such things in the real world, where you think about the position of your character
Sure, but it wasn't only the lack of little things that got to me. I picked up on the little scenarios just because it is, first and foremost, a vidya game. It did try to connect to the whole Deus Ex debate in cutscenes, but only ever by acknowledging its existence, acknowledging the varying arguments put into it, and using it as a backdrop for a wonderfully realised near-future world. I excuse it based on the fact that the world design is visually astounding (though Detroit is tiny and Hengsha confuses the map) and that it's generally a fun game, though an easy one.
I think your point is that their acknowledgement of the concept of man-made gods made you think on it a bit. That's cool, it probably will do, but conversely it's what irritated me, because it should be the game that does that: it needed to play with the idea more than just introduce a concept to you and let you do your own thing with it. I was sat there my first time, having this internal debate about the pros, cons, rights and wrongs of turning everybody into super humans. It hit me that Jensen is intended to be the proof that it's possible, and that they have the technology to replace a body with machines, rather than just limbs and organs with prosthetics. It started that little what-if thing in me that most cyberpunk titles do. Then I got more frustrated as the game went on, because I had all these neat ideas that could have easily been put into the game one way or the other, and ultimately it struck me that they just didn't care for the concept that much. They paid their dues to it every now and then, but I was sat there thinking of this and that of my own accord. They wanted to make an actiony stealthy RPG hybrid thing with crafting and player progression, and set it in a cool universe with cool robots and the illuminati. They put Deus Ex in the name and barely bothered with the notion itself. They just said "some people like augmentation, some think it's unnatural", then cut to riots and Hugh Darrow just starting to touch on it before the game shuffles you on to the ending. You're made aware of Sarif, who's for it, Darrow who is overwhelmed by the power he unlocked, and Taggart, who is supposedly against it but who knows with that type of person. It takes this really interesting, complex idea and then whittles it down to binary opposition for and against it, and never really lets the player make their opinion known in the game world until you're there pushing a button for or against it at the very end.
Seriously? I think DE:HR was far ahead of other games in terms of story, and the way it's been told.
I thought that too, when I was wrapped up in the atmosphere of it. It's a constant stream of dialogue, conversation options and atmosphere, but when I was done I realised it actually said very little about its core concept and was, in and of itself, a hostage rescue story with robots. It needed less "No John I am the illuminati" and more "this is Eliza Cassan and I just blew your mind, Son." The Cassan thing got me really thinking, it was awesome, but it's the only thing in the game that more subtly addressed it. You were sat there like "but people would know, I mean I suppose an infallible robot is better than a person, but what if..." and it was great. It needed far more of that, far more "I never asked for this" and way fewer mad sick cyborg fights. We got to see a whole lot of rockets and swords and stuff integrated into people's bodies, but it needed to question things that would have an impact on society. Things like the news being automated, people using social enhancement augmentations to seduce people and to get a pay rise at work. Interesting stuff that opened up all new avenues for social reform and opportunities for exploring them, not just "they said it was for good and then they put rockets on them, and rockets are bad, yo."
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Not at all! I'm not even being picky, just suggesting that the storyline for RAGE was as much as the setting needed and that the one for DE:HR was far, far less than the context demanded.
I honestly think that the merits of story delivery are dependent on the genre. I rate narrative qualities and devices as per their context in the given game, movie, book, whatever. RAGE, Borderlands, Wasteland, Fallout 3 onwards, they're all a similar kind of setting. They're kooky, post-apocalyptic settings which reflect the degrading sanity of their inhabitants. The way I see it, you won't end up with a traditional story in any setting like this that is either ultraviolent or Suda 51 in tone. Fallout 3's main story fails because it tries to be too serious. You get Liam Neeson in to play an earnest man in the same universe as some of the shit you encounter in the Wasteland and the dissonance just throws credibility and immersion out of the window. Were you to do a similarly serious story for RAGE, Borderlands, Wasteland, whatever, you'd have a serious clash with the aesthetic and general feel of each game's universe. Because of that, all of their stories do fit, and they all suit the settings, RAGE included. It skirts the border between zany humor and too-serious-for-the-setting drama, but ultimately ends up fitting the context and succeeding. The style they went with doesn't agree with complex storylines: they'd have to go far more towards The Walking Dead/This War of Mine kinds of serious human drama for story delivery to ever really come into it.
Deus Ex HR, meanwhile, takes on an incredibly complex philosophical, existential debate and goes nowhere with it. The universe fits the story, but the story doesn't fit the quandary. The whole idea of it was to question what it means to be human, and to question if replacing parts of us changes our identity as a species. It sticks you at the tipping point, where it's come to a head and people start taking up positions on either side of the fence. It basically asks whether it's the next logical step for mankind's advancement (and if the people up in arms are no different to those who refused to integrate after the Industrial Revolution) or what we're doing is wrong, if we should be playing God (badoomtish) or if it's just not conducive to survival. So that in itself is a wonderful story, it's seriously open to so many moral dilemmas that you could propose to the player. How do they tackle it? They don't. They use tropes from different genres and never really address the augmented elephant in the room.
At what point do the player's actions (not meaningless conversation options) force them to choose a side? You could do all sorts of in-game stuff, making the player choose what to do as this hulking, gravel-dispensing cyborg, but instead you just do other stuff, such as beating people up, hacking terminals... uh... beating more people up... eating candy bars, hacking some more terminals, so on. Like, I dunno, have a non-augmented kid beating up an augmented one who refuses to use his hulk smash to break the bully's spine. Let Jensen intervene however the player wants. The side quests are just regular RPG help-a-buddy quests but you do it with robotic enhancements. In terms of gameplay, nothing comes even close to addressing the debate that the whole thing is based on. You simply start human, get beaten up, then the beardy old Englishman behind it all has a mid-life crisis and finally addresses the question of whether or not it's right to augment people, then goes back on his word when you say like 3 sentences. Then there's a woman who takes the whole thing too far and "look at what horrors can be achieved through augmentation whoooo spooooky". Then you quite literally press a button on the Choose-Your-Ending machine in a room behind her and everything you've done so far is referred to vaguely in a cutscene that says "I could've used my sick ninja blades to decapitate more dudes but I held back and just punched them off instead".
The whole moral quandary makes for a captivating setting, but its presence in the game itself is minimal. There is no story, or rather there are like three stories that don't mesh and that have the effort of one storyline's construction spread among them all. Mey-gan gets kidnapped, so you have a boring old save-the-girl story. When you rescue her she barely acknowledges your existence and then fucks off in a VTOL. Great. She was the primary focus for 2/3 of the game and that's all the pay-out you get. Then Hugh Darrow goes nuts so you play that remaining third of the game, sprinting around if you're playing non-lethal and mowing down innocents if you aren't. Holed up around the place are businessmen who conveniently all represent opposing views on the augmentation conundrum. Said businessmen all try to convince you that their use of augmentations is the best one because they all want to make money and at the end of the day none of them were your friends at all. Oh, also they're about 1/3 of the illuminati, yeah, that's the third one. So you've got an old cliché for 2/3 of the game's duration that amounts to nix, then the Hugh Darrow mental breakdown that happens and is resolved almost immediately, then you kill a sane and successful member of the illuminati who in a moment of madness thought it would be smart to hook herself up to a futuristic car battery in order to become a super computer. It had so much potential as a moody exploration of the nature of man but ultimately was decimated into fetch quests, a damsel in distress and a mad villain or two.
tl;dr
They take this wonderful concept full of what-ifs and potential moral dilemmas and instead just create a futuristic setting with rad robots. Gameplay consists of fetch quests and the narrative never tackles the actual elements of the debate, but rather makes the player aware of them and then ends the game. The storyline that they did go with is uninspired and really choppy. They try to fit three storylines into a can made for one, one being a crappy save-the-girl plot, another being two wealthy, successful people spontaneously going crazy with power (one being talked down from it moments later despite apparent years of internal turmoil about it) and a third one being that they were all part of the illuminati all along because the previous games were about the illuminati so they felt they had to cram it in here too. It's lazy, it's confused, it's rushed and, worst of all, it delves into exciting, almost-virgin video game narrative territory and says "oh, hi, sorry, don't mind me, just passing through."
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There are actually ENB presets out there to make it more yellow. 'cus, y'know... reasons.
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Even if they just use the same engine with updated textures AND HAVE MUCH LONGER PLAYTIME I would be happy with that as I enjoyed DX:HR and the DLC.
But I thought you were against poor story delivery.
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Faridah Malik's death will apparently now be considered canon for the sake of the new game
Spy Boy has no soul, confirmed.
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Yeah, I played it a little while go. Nothing struck me as different, really. You'd have to show me a side-by-side for me to notice, so there's obviously nothing major.
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Looks good! The site itself is pretty well-designed and, following the guide to Quinn Co at least, is comprehensive. I think that grammar and formatting of the information is lacking, but the information itself is great.
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One should think the better the graphics get, the better you can tell the story, bring the mood, ...
That's true for a whole load of games that come to mind. I really don't believe in the claim that game developers in general are getting lazier or less inspired. The stuff coming out is amazing, it's just that for some reason people think AAA dross is representative of any sort of trend in the industry. It isn't, it's just a noisy and well-funded group of publishers making noise at their own conventions while the majority of people worth talking to ignore them or attend their stuff to poke fun at the uninspired stuff they put out. Saying that AAA productions are any indication of the state of the industry is like saying that pop music's prevalence means all other music is irrelevant. The "le wrong generation xDDDDD" argument is unfounded, seriously.
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Lots of far worse ones, too! Besides, if we judged everything based on the competition it has, we'd have too much in common with most countries' education systems. It's far healthier to judge something based on its competition in hindsight, not when you're going into it. You can judge things based on their own merits far better when you're not remembering how great your favorite game ever is.
Darkmod: Inspiration thread
in TDM Editors Guild
Posted
I can smell it